Singer With Insights Honed in Chappaqua

By DAN MARKOWITZ

Published: February 18, 1996

MOUNT KISCO—
WHEN Dar Williams, the folk singer who grew up in Chappaqua and is now on a concert tour of the United States opening for Joan Baez, wrote the song "You're Aging Well," she was 25. Ms. Baez, 54, who along with Bob Dylan helped popularize folk music, heard the song and liked it so much that she recorded it with Ms. Williams at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village on her new release, "Ring Them Bells."

Ms. Williams is 28 now, and with two record releases to her name, "The Honesty Room" and "Mortal City," she is one of the hottest young folk artists in the country. "Mortal City" was released on Jan. 23 and sold more than 5,500 copies in its first two weeks, according to the music-selling source Sound Scan, published in Billboard magazine. Much of Ms. Williams's appeal stems from her precocious lyrical insights evident in songs like "You're Aging Well," "When I Was a Boy" and "The Babysitter," and a high, lulling voice reminiscent of Joni Mitchell.

It's funny," said Ms. Williams, who just a few years ago while playing only small coffeehouses in Boston contemplated quitting and applying to graduate playwriting programs. "We're a pretty teen-centric society. When you hit 25, you think it's over.

"You start hearing jokes about sagging bodies and being out of your prime golden years. I was basically left for a younger woman at 25 who was more doting than I was. It was very interesting for me to see that that's kind of an ageless phenomenon and that you're never too young to outgrow biases."

At 9, Ms. Williams began playing the guitar. When she was 11, she wrote her first song. At a recent concert at the Tree Star Cafe here, she said that she was inspired to write and play music by her Horace Greeley High School music teacher, Ron Dunn. But it was not until she had graduated from Wesleyan College in Middletown, Conn., with a religion and theater double major that she did any more than dabble in playing folk music.

"On my list of what I wanted to do," Ms. Williams said, "folk music was part of it, but I had no idea that there was an actual world, a network, of folk music where I could start."

Then a singing teacher told Ms. Williams about coffeehouses like Naked City and Nameless in Boston where she could perform at open-mike nights. Finding it "really hard," Ms. Williams had just about decided to quit when on a Friday the 13th in 1992, she "let her guard down a little bit and had a real rapport with the audience." "I made a discovery that night that I could be myself on stage and that just loosened me up tremendously," she continued.

Around that time, Ms. Williams said, the connections in her songs became a lot stronger. "They reached out as well as up," she said. "So it didn't just seem like stream of consciousness."

The result was that a folk-music band called the Nields persuaded her to go to Hartford, where a music station, WWUH (91.3 FM), began inviting her to play live on fund-raising programs. Ms. Williams's independently produced record "The Honesty Room," which has sold more than 25,000 copies, was released in the winter of 1993, and she said, "After that, I could always get a gig." Young/Hunter became her management firm and Razor and Tie her record company in 1994.

"All those very icky ups-and-downs that you face with a bad bar gig, bad tip-jar gig and a bad coffeehouse gig come back to you when things get hard in the middle of good times," Ms. Williams said. "There used to be a day when there would be nobody listening, $25 and no respect. It has kept me humble, and I think honest and pretty honed to just know that things could go in either direction and I'd be able to handle it."

Growing up and facing the limitations put on girls and then young women by a male-dominated society is a driving theme in Ms. Williams's songs as is the forging of her song characters' identities as they leave bad relationships to seek and enter better ones.

"If you're really sucked up into a relationship -- there's even a whole realm of psychology called 'merged detachment,' " Ms. Williams said, "the fear is, you will try to grow by merging with somebody rather than have a parallel existence.

"I certainly experienced that. I was very dysfunctional. In college, I just wanted to merge in with whatever life someone was having that I was going out with and that kept me isolated from other people because you don't want to just glom onto anybody's life, and I was also unable to find myself in those relationships. I think I was just so embarrassed, and it was too hard to be myself and ask somebody to be a part of my totally confused, amorphous, creative life.

"So it was nice to finally be in a relationship where all the creative challenges and all the sharp edges and messiness of a creative life and a professional life were still there, and the fears that I would sell out or burn out were very realistic. That was proof to me that I was living my own life and not using a relationship as an excuse to escape all the growing pains of being creative."